You are paying for the development of this type of weapon because somebody else is also paying for them. How many countries started developing nuclear weapons once it was clear that the technology was feasible? If the Manhanttan project didn't happen do you not think there would be nuclear weapons today?
I shudder to think about the social and political implications of 500 gram weapons with the explosive power of 5 tons of TNT but stopping research will only enhance their attractiveness to our potential adversaries. The right thing to do, which is hard, is to learn as much as we could about it and proceed forward in an informed manner with due diligence.
One rope of singled walled carbon nanotubes sits suspended above another in a crossbar configuration. When an electric charge is
applied, the top nanotube rope bends downward, where it is held in place by van der waals attraction to the bottom rope. To
deactivate the switch, another charge is applied to repel the bent nano-rope into its original position.
This electromechanical switch works as a switch because of tunneling of electrons between the upper rope and the lower rope. When
the ropes are sticking together, enough electrons tunnel from the upper to the lower, or vice versa so that one can measure a good signal,
turning the switch on. When the ropes are apart, the tunneling conductance drops by several orders of magnitude, turning the switch
off.
The original experiment was done with bundles of carbon nanotubes. In principle, the concept should work at much higher densities
for single nanotubes, but the technology still has hurdles to cross. Currently, the tubes conduct because ropes of tubes are likely to
contain both semiconductor type and metal type tubes. Since metal type tubes are fantastic conductors, having even a few of them in a
rope will allow a device to work. However, when one crosses the threshold to single nanotubes, the device will only work if the tubes
are metal type. Hence, an important problem will be finding a way to produce only metal type single walled nanotubes. Currently,
carbon nanotubes are produced in a mixture of semiconductor type and metal type nanotubes. It's difficult to control that property
because it depends sensitively on the way the sp2 bonds on the nanotube sidewall line up, something that no one yet knows how to control.
One minute Baghdad was quiet. The next then entire southern horizon lit up. The MSNBC reporter was so shaken Tom Brokaw broke away to give him time to collect himself.
Yeah, shock and awe is an appropriate description, even when you're watching a feed on the internet at 56K.
How apple can dope people into thinking that Macs are just as fast as PCs in terms for performance is beyond me.
Buy a Mac because it has OS X, buy it because you like the low power consumption, the overall design and the unique style. Don't buy it because you think that it's faster.
"Vastly inferior Windoze" seems to be a mantra around here.
Please explain why Windoze is vastly inferior. I run and develop software on Irix, Apple, and Linux environments, but at the end of the day, it's my WinXP machine that gives me the greatest flexibility and ease of use.
It goes for weeks without a single crash, every device I've tried installs and runs like butter. Software installation and uninstallation is a snap, and the array of tools that I can use is amazing.
WinXP is a great desktop environment. I wouldn't use it as a server, but as a workstation it's close enough with OS X that the choice boils down to how much experience you've had with either platform. Linux just cannot compare.
Lots of people around here bash Windows without realizing how much it has changed, and too many give OS X and Linux credit for stability without realizing that given carefully tested narrowly selected hardware and limited installed software services, any modern OS runs rock solid as far as single users are concerned.
Centrino = Pentium M + Intel 855 chipset + Calexico 802.11a/b
However, each of the above three is a separate component. In theory a manufacturer could choose not to package the three together. However, to achieve the Centrino specification, they would have to conform to the above standard.
Hope that this makes it clear.
You might recall this notebook from a while back.
Now, if your make an honest assessment of the features, you may find that at ~$1400 after rebate,
this notebook, from a price/performance point of view,
might compare favorably with these. Now I'm
not talking about originality or color schemes. I'm talking about what you get in terms of functionality for the money that you paid.
Now, the BestBuy notebook has a significant weak point in terms of battery performance. The Pentium-4M processor that it uses
consumes more power than Motorola G4s found on PowerBooks but runs somewhat faster. Depending what you want to do, you can still,
therefore, make a good case for a PowerBook.
However, you take the Pentium-4M, and replace it with a chip that's
this much faster, with as good battery performance as the
G4 (notice the fpu performance at 600 MHz, for example), and the remaining advantage of the PowerBooks evaporates.
People may still buy PowerBooks because of style and OS X, but in terms of overall functionality, a Centino notebook will blow away a
PowerBook. I'm looking forward to getting my widescreen one six months down the line (and no, I'm not affiliated in anyway with any of
the companies involved, I've just been looking into purchasing a notebook lately since lots of my colleagues have gotten PowerBooks).
PowerBooks are GREAT devices, but the Wintel world is fast over taking them due to their reliance on Motorola's G4 processor. Let's
hope that Apple gets one of those other processors into their product line
real soon.
How about Paramount get people who can actually do drama to write the show?
What's wrong with the current one?
Where's the passion? Where's the suspense? Where's the drama? Why is there dialogue for the sake of dialogue? Why does the audience feel no tension in times of supposed danger?
To get a good show going:
Everything in the show should be driven by the story. No dialogue or other things happening for the sake of having things happen.
Villains should be extremely competent. Battles should be lethal. Dangerous environments should be unforgiving. Ship to ship battles should reflect speed, suddeness, lethatlity, etc. Look to the Hunt for the Red October not Star Wars for inspiration.
The unthinkable should happen but happen infrequently. So should miracles.
No fuzzy wuzzy feelings. No complete evil.
Dialogue, when it's there, should be poignant, even ferocious.
Of course, if somebody could do all that they'd be doing NYPD Blue not Star Trek. This should change.
Hold your doomsaying Chicken Little!
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hold your doom saying Chicken Little!
Anyone with anything longer than the media's memory will remember the same type of things being said about electronics, automobiles,
manufacturing, etc.
Fundamentally, the key driver of American economic greatness lies in a cultural, educational, and economic environment that offers
unmatched support for innovation and entrepreneurship. India and China may both have large, cheap, and now, in some ways, well
educated work forces, but can they match the Americans for the ability to innovate?
Now, notice that I said ability, as I'm sure than any Indian or Chinese guy has just as much capacity to innovate as any Joe, Jose, Abu
or Jing American. However, behind every Hewlett or Moore stands a team of multitalented and innovative workers, a well informed and
wealthy capital market, a government that balances freedom with encouragement and regulation, a base of wealthy consumers ready to spend
money on new things, and networks of individuals that provide knowledge and access to all of the preceding. Getting all that requires
a pervasive culture of freedom in thought and expression, tolerance for different cultures, ethnicities and viewpoints, research
institutions that are capable of excellence in multiple discipline simultaneously, well connected financial and legal networks that serve
investors and innovators, institutions, regulations and laws that have been refined over decades of experience. You won't find this in
India and China, even with the free flow of expertise and experts in the modern global marketplace, it will still take decades for either to
build anything resembling what we have in America today. Historically, by the time that nations arrive at that level of development
(read Europe and Japan), wages would have become on par with those here in America.
So, how should we regard the obviously painful current state of the IT industry? Once again, we can turn to history. In the
past, during each round of economic expansion, new ideas, new services, leading edge products, et cetera, inject wealth and jobs into the
American economy. On subsequent rounds of contraction and adjustment, more mature industries begin shifting their work to cheaper
overseas sites as companies become more efficient, domestic labor markets become more favorable to employers, and financing and
infrastructure becomes cheaper, setting the stage for the next round of expansion. Usually, during these transition periods, a great
number of domestic employees in mature industries loose their jobs. Almost all of these people eventually get jobs either by joining
more competitive outfits, applying their existing skills to up and coming industries, or switching professions after a period of
re-education. Overall, after each round of expansion and contraction, the economy achieves net growth.
Now, there are caveats to this generalization.
A. Markets are not perfect, and the market, as we have seen, can be rife with fraud, monopoly, faulty loans, ignorant or stupid
investors, etc.
B. Social pressures during the transition can cause unrest or the enactment of unwise policies.
C. The human productive lifespan is finite. Since modern industries often require professionals who have spent much of their
lives in school, when industries mature, many of those professionals may find themselves unable to recover from the huge amount of lost time
and capital investment that they spent educating themselves for a profession that no longer requires them.
Perhaps point C is most poignant with the Slashdot crowd, and it represents a real and worrying trend that is likely to exacerbate due to
the increasingly complex and specialized nature of modern technical fields. Historically, the services sector (sales, real-estate,
support, education, etc.) has provided a safety valve for displaced technical professionals. Often, people would spend a decade and a
half working in industry, be laid off, and spend the rest of their lives selling houses or teaching. However, now a days people who
want to work in technology have to spend so much time educating themselves that they may never be able to recoup their investments.
Over the long term, this may undermine America's lead in technological innovation and entrepreneurship by discouraging future generations
from pursuing careers in science and engineering, but I think steps can be undertaken to avoid this.
1. At the undergraduate level, universities should concentrate on teaching widely applicable mathematical and scientific problem
solving skills instead of merely instilling knowledge related to set major. This is already taking place at many of the best
universities but need to happen on a wider scale in more campuses.
2. Science and engineering education should become more multi-disciplinary and research driven to prepare the next generation of
innovators for the convergence of chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computation (think nanotech, bioinformatics, designer
pharmaceuticals, engineered chemicals) that are beginning to take place today and will likely drive the economy of the next century.
3. Enact regulation to protect pensions so that future generations will not have to face the prospect of having worked 80 hours
weeks for a decade only to end up with a pile of worthless stock options.
Also, as the recent spate of corporate failures have shown, there are still significant market failures that need to be addressed.
4. We need to better regulate the accounting and investment industries and reform corporate laws to allow more transparent and
reliable accounting.
5. We need to better educate investors about the source of value and the basic economics of the stock market.
6. We need more independent, better staffed, and more skilled regulatory agencies.
7. We need to acknowledge the need that there are key basic industries that are essential to national security. When
necessary, we need to protect these industries, to a degree, against market trends.
Things like aircraft avionics where reliability is prized over speed.
It wouldn't take too many of these to drive a typical fighter aircraft's radar system, for example, and with the Dragon Chip they know that there won't be any nasty nesteggs courtesy of the NSA.
For reference, the Mig-29 upgraded version used to use the equivalent of 486DX33s.
This is a very narrow view of the tremendous progress being made in drug design.
Most drugs on the market today were discovered either fortuitously or through maticulous screening of candidate compounds.
Over the past two decades, pogress in biotechnology and chemistry have begun an industry wide evolution from drug dicovery to rational design of pharmaceuticals.
On experimental front, our maturing ability to decode and manipulate genetic information and proteins structures have given us powerful new ways of investigating the mechanisms governing agents or processes that cause disease. At the same time, new robotic screening tools have given us the ability to assay thousands of chemicals simultaneously while MEMS and nanotechnology such as biofunctionalized cantilevers are beginning to allow us to peer into the complex chemistry at work inside cells.
However, up to now, these new experimental methods have not produced significant gains in the output of pharmaceuticals because we are still not able to efficiently process the tremendous amount of information necessary to design new drugs. For example, while automated compound screening systems could screen thousands of chemicals in a short period, the search for a chemical that binds specifically to a drug target will typically involve millions of compounds. In other words, though our experimental methods are impressive int their speed, power, and efficiency, they still fall far short of our requirements. What we need are ways to filter through tremendously large amounts of information to arrive at the few pertinent that we can uses to conduct experiments.
What is exciting is that these methods are coming online as a result of the increase in computational power and the development of sophisticated bioinformatics and computational chemistry software. Over the next five to ten years, we will begin to truly reap the rewards of rational drug design as a new generation of software tools that search and organize genetic information, predict protein structures and functions, and automatically screen for ligand specific binding agents begin cranking out thousands of good experimental candidates to be used as input by our improved experimental methods. Only then, when we have relieved the problem of information glut, will we see the true power of rational drug design.
If you're really serious about doing any type of biology or chemistry, a PhD is a requirement. Physics people have more in the way of engineering jobs at the MS level, but also need PhD to do serious research.
More to the point, designing and engineering a bridge is the art of integrating and applying commodity technologies to an unique set of requirements. The value offered by people doing the architecture lies in their ability to offer a custom tailored and extremely reliable product along with extensive support services throughout the lifetime of the product. IN other words, an irreplaceable part of the value lies with the reputation, reliability, and expertise of the product designers, so they need not worry about others stealing their designs.
With many software packages, almost all of the value lies in the unique algorithms and other ip contained within the source code. This is why they need to protect that information.
Nanotech and biotech are merging fields. Nature has spent 2 billion years building efficient self-assembling machines and information processing systems. It would be insane for us nanotech people to ignore that.
We need to modify the systems we find in nature to optimize for rational design, operation under different chemical environments, and heirarchical assembly, but we will at least take inspiration, if not entire processes, from biological machinery.
Even though I write software for *nix environment, I use Windows XP on my workstation.
1. Hardware installation is a breeze. 2. Software installation is also a breeze. 3. Multimedia files play flawlessly on WinAmp and Windows Media Player (don't use the new one, go into the media player directory and make a shortcut to mplayer2, which is Media Player 6.4. 4. Free site licenses on Office and Visual Studios. 5. Easy file sharing with the other Windows workstations on the network. 6. Games 7. I'm used to the WinXP interface. 8. Very VERY seldomly has my WinXP machine crashed on me. In fact, it's more stable than my Linux install. The trick seems to be diligence in keeping only essential background services and putting together a computer with hardware that has been tested for stability and compatibility. I did this by buying a Dell...
I must admit that *nix is essential if you want a development platform for open source software. I'm currently considering a iBook or G4 Book for my next computer purchase.
Yeah, no kidding, WinXP is fine for work. Even if you work in a Linux/Unix environment, which I do, you can do fine with ssh and xwin32 (starting to sound like a Microsoft employee aren't I =) ).
Linux works fine too... until you try to install some new program or new hardware.
IMHO Linux - Servers. Unix - proprietary servers. Windows - desktop.
Sure you can use them to see stealth aircraft coming, but, due to the long wavelength nature of the radar, you can nail down the aircraft's location to about a 50 mile radius sphere.
Good luck trying to shoot it down.
Low observable planes, the Air Force's code name for stealth, also receive visual and infra red treatment to make them harder to detect that way.
All stealth missions are backed up by massive jamming from EA-6Bs and other aircraft.
With the F22, if an enemy aircraft does 1. Avoids getting shot down. 2. Detects it. 3. Catch up to it. It will still be almost impossible for the enemy plane to lock on. The F22's radar scans other radars and jams them at the precise moment when they try to lock on.
Bistatic and multisource radars are a threat, but again, the question is whether they get good enough signal to shoot. That answer's probably no. Furthermore, now a days JDAMs cost $25,000 a pop, which is pretty cheap compared to any type of radar emitter.
The cutting edge in LO, from the available literature, seems to be lowering maintanence costs and all-aspect stealth, which just means that infra red and visual stealth are becoming more and more important. Supposedly, with some clever arrangement of lights, one can make aircraft almost invisible to the eye as close as 1 mile out. With a plane flying at 500 mph, that's practically invisible.
So is stealth beatable? Sure, despite everything mentioned above, you can shoot down a stealth aircraft. The question is, how much is it gonna cost you to prepare the defenses? How much of your own equipment and people do you loose in the process? The answer, short of new breakthroughs in stealth detection, is enormous.
Does the US really need stealth in the modern environment? Not likely. The sales pitch is that taking on stealth is so daunting that it deters anyone from even trying. That's a statement that has some merit.
Seriously, this would be awesome for FPS if they reprogram it to be more compatible with those games (ie ability to use the key pad and type at the same time).
The biggest thing going against accuracy when people are playing a game like Quake, other than eye strain, is that the mouse has mass and friction, which your arm muscles are constantly fighting against. Consequently, it's difficult to make large movements and small corrections with the same sensitivity set up. However, that's exactly what you need to do in a lot of situations you encounter in Quake/Counter Strike/UT.
It would be great if they can rewrite the software to track your finger movements at high sampling rates and accuracies.
Yeah, but I don't think the key board knows which finger is which, unless you start wearing a corresponding electronic tag on each finger or something.
G77 works great, but what about ifc (Intel Fortran Compiler)? Anybody tried using it?
I tried using ifc (free Linux version) to compile some of my Fortran 77 code, but the program crashes on writing to and from internal files.
Is ifc only compatible with Fortran 95? Is G77 compatible with Fortran 95?
Anybody know other good free compilers?
Slashdot Mirror
You are paying for the development of this type of weapon because somebody else is also paying for them. How many countries started developing nuclear weapons once it was clear that the technology was feasible? If the Manhanttan project didn't happen do you not think there would be nuclear weapons today?
I shudder to think about the social and political implications of 500 gram weapons with the explosive power of 5 tons of TNT but stopping research will only enhance their attractiveness to our potential adversaries. The right thing to do, which is hard, is to learn as much as we could about it and proceed forward in an informed manner with due diligence.
Considering the forces involved, I doubt that physical shock will jar one of these junctions loose.
For those who are interested, the Nantero's technology is based on earlier work in the lab of Charles M. Lieber. The original paper was published in the journal Science. Rueckes et al, Science, Vol 289, P. 94. Rueckes went on to found Nantero.
The original experiment worked as follows:
The original experiment was done with bundles of carbon nanotubes. In principle, the concept should work at much higher densities for single nanotubes, but the technology still has hurdles to cross. Currently, the tubes conduct because ropes of tubes are likely to contain both semiconductor type and metal type tubes. Since metal type tubes are fantastic conductors, having even a few of them in a rope will allow a device to work. However, when one crosses the threshold to single nanotubes, the device will only work if the tubes are metal type. Hence, an important problem will be finding a way to produce only metal type single walled nanotubes. Currently, carbon nanotubes are produced in a mixture of semiconductor type and metal type nanotubes. It's difficult to control that property because it depends sensitively on the way the sp2 bonds on the nanotube sidewall line up, something that no one yet knows how to control.
One minute Baghdad was quiet. The next then entire southern horizon lit up. The MSNBC reporter was so shaken Tom Brokaw broke away to give him time to collect himself.
Yeah, shock and awe is an appropriate description, even when you're watching a feed on the internet at 56K.
How apple can dope people into thinking that Macs are just as fast as PCs in terms for performance is beyond me.
Buy a Mac because it has OS X, buy it because you like the low power consumption, the overall design and the unique style. Don't buy it because you think that it's faster.
Application benchmarks.
How Macs are faster than PCs and other lies.
Benchmarks.
"Vastly inferior Windoze" seems to be a mantra around here.
Please explain why Windoze is vastly inferior. I run and develop software on Irix, Apple, and Linux environments, but at the end of the day, it's my WinXP machine that gives me the greatest flexibility and ease of use.
It goes for weeks without a single crash, every device I've tried installs and runs like butter. Software installation and uninstallation is a snap, and the array of tools that I can use is amazing.
WinXP is a great desktop environment. I wouldn't use it as a server, but as a workstation it's close enough with OS X that the choice boils down to how much experience you've had with either platform. Linux just cannot compare.
Lots of people around here bash Windows without realizing how much it has changed, and too many give OS X and Linux credit for stability without realizing that given carefully tested narrowly selected hardware and limited installed software services, any modern OS runs rock solid as far as single users are concerned.
Centrino = Pentium M + Intel 855 chipset + Calexico 802.11a/b However, each of the above three is a separate component. In theory a manufacturer could choose not to package the three together. However, to achieve the Centrino specification, they would have to conform to the above standard. Hope that this makes it clear.
You might recall this notebook from a while back. Now, if your make an honest assessment of the features, you may find that at ~$1400 after rebate, this notebook, from a price/performance point of view, might compare favorably with these. Now I'm not talking about originality or color schemes. I'm talking about what you get in terms of functionality for the money that you paid.
Now, the BestBuy notebook has a significant weak point in terms of battery performance. The Pentium-4M processor that it uses consumes more power than Motorola G4s found on PowerBooks but runs somewhat faster. Depending what you want to do, you can still, therefore, make a good case for a PowerBook.
However, you take the Pentium-4M, and replace it with a chip that's this much faster, with as good battery performance as the G4 (notice the fpu performance at 600 MHz, for example), and the remaining advantage of the PowerBooks evaporates.
People may still buy PowerBooks because of style and OS X, but in terms of overall functionality, a Centino notebook will blow away a PowerBook. I'm looking forward to getting my widescreen one six months down the line (and no, I'm not affiliated in anyway with any of the companies involved, I've just been looking into purchasing a notebook lately since lots of my colleagues have gotten PowerBooks).
PowerBooks are GREAT devices, but the Wintel world is fast over taking them due to their reliance on Motorola's G4 processor. Let's hope that Apple gets one of those other processors into their product line real soon.
And the rest of the writing team.
How about Paramount get people who can actually do drama to write the show?
What's wrong with the current one?
Where's the passion?
Where's the suspense?
Where's the drama?
Why is there dialogue for the sake of dialogue?
Why does the audience feel no tension in times of supposed danger?
To get a good show going:
Everything in the show should be driven by the story. No dialogue or other things happening for the sake of having things happen.
Villains should be extremely competent. Battles should be lethal. Dangerous environments should be unforgiving. Ship to ship battles should reflect speed, suddeness, lethatlity, etc. Look to the Hunt for the Red October not Star Wars for inspiration.
The unthinkable should happen but happen infrequently. So should miracles.
No fuzzy wuzzy feelings. No complete evil.
Dialogue, when it's there, should be poignant, even ferocious.
Of course, if somebody could do all that they'd be doing NYPD Blue not Star Trek. This should change.
Hold your doom saying Chicken Little!
Anyone with anything longer than the media's memory will remember the same type of things being said about electronics, automobiles, manufacturing, etc.
Fundamentally, the key driver of American economic greatness lies in a cultural, educational, and economic environment that offers unmatched support for innovation and entrepreneurship. India and China may both have large, cheap, and now, in some ways, well educated work forces, but can they match the Americans for the ability to innovate?
Now, notice that I said ability, as I'm sure than any Indian or Chinese guy has just as much capacity to innovate as any Joe, Jose, Abu or Jing American. However, behind every Hewlett or Moore stands a team of multitalented and innovative workers, a well informed and wealthy capital market, a government that balances freedom with encouragement and regulation, a base of wealthy consumers ready to spend money on new things, and networks of individuals that provide knowledge and access to all of the preceding. Getting all that requires a pervasive culture of freedom in thought and expression, tolerance for different cultures, ethnicities and viewpoints, research institutions that are capable of excellence in multiple discipline simultaneously, well connected financial and legal networks that serve investors and innovators, institutions, regulations and laws that have been refined over decades of experience. You won't find this in India and China, even with the free flow of expertise and experts in the modern global marketplace, it will still take decades for either to build anything resembling what we have in America today. Historically, by the time that nations arrive at that level of development (read Europe and Japan), wages would have become on par with those here in America.
So, how should we regard the obviously painful current state of the IT industry? Once again, we can turn to history. In the past, during each round of economic expansion, new ideas, new services, leading edge products, et cetera, inject wealth and jobs into the American economy. On subsequent rounds of contraction and adjustment, more mature industries begin shifting their work to cheaper overseas sites as companies become more efficient, domestic labor markets become more favorable to employers, and financing and infrastructure becomes cheaper, setting the stage for the next round of expansion. Usually, during these transition periods, a great number of domestic employees in mature industries loose their jobs. Almost all of these people eventually get jobs either by joining more competitive outfits, applying their existing skills to up and coming industries, or switching professions after a period of re-education. Overall, after each round of expansion and contraction, the economy achieves net growth.
Now, there are caveats to this generalization.
A. Markets are not perfect, and the market, as we have seen, can be rife with fraud, monopoly, faulty loans, ignorant or stupid investors, etc.
B. Social pressures during the transition can cause unrest or the enactment of unwise policies.
C. The human productive lifespan is finite. Since modern industries often require professionals who have spent much of their lives in school, when industries mature, many of those professionals may find themselves unable to recover from the huge amount of lost time and capital investment that they spent educating themselves for a profession that no longer requires them.
Perhaps point C is most poignant with the Slashdot crowd, and it represents a real and worrying trend that is likely to exacerbate due to the increasingly complex and specialized nature of modern technical fields. Historically, the services sector (sales, real-estate, support, education, etc.) has provided a safety valve for displaced technical professionals. Often, people would spend a decade and a half working in industry, be laid off, and spend the rest of their lives selling houses or teaching. However, now a days people who want to work in technology have to spend so much time educating themselves that they may never be able to recoup their investments. Over the long term, this may undermine America's lead in technological innovation and entrepreneurship by discouraging future generations from pursuing careers in science and engineering, but I think steps can be undertaken to avoid this.
1. At the undergraduate level, universities should concentrate on teaching widely applicable mathematical and scientific problem solving skills instead of merely instilling knowledge related to set major. This is already taking place at many of the best universities but need to happen on a wider scale in more campuses.
2. Science and engineering education should become more multi-disciplinary and research driven to prepare the next generation of innovators for the convergence of chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, and computation (think nanotech, bioinformatics, designer pharmaceuticals, engineered chemicals) that are beginning to take place today and will likely drive the economy of the next century.
3. Enact regulation to protect pensions so that future generations will not have to face the prospect of having worked 80 hours weeks for a decade only to end up with a pile of worthless stock options.
Also, as the recent spate of corporate failures have shown, there are still significant market failures that need to be addressed.
4. We need to better regulate the accounting and investment industries and reform corporate laws to allow more transparent and reliable accounting.
5. We need to better educate investors about the source of value and the basic economics of the stock market.
6. We need more independent, better staffed, and more skilled regulatory agencies.
7. We need to acknowledge the need that there are key basic industries that are essential to national security. When necessary, we need to protect these industries, to a degree, against market trends.
Things like aircraft avionics where reliability is prized over speed.
It wouldn't take too many of these to drive a typical fighter aircraft's radar system, for example, and with the Dragon Chip they know that there won't be any nasty nesteggs courtesy of the NSA.
For reference, the Mig-29 upgraded version used to use the equivalent of 486DX33s.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that most of that software run on clusters of Linux machines.
This is a very narrow view of the tremendous progress being made in drug design.
Most drugs on the market today were discovered either fortuitously or through maticulous screening of candidate compounds.
Over the past two decades, pogress in biotechnology and chemistry have begun an industry wide evolution from drug dicovery to rational design of pharmaceuticals.
On experimental front, our maturing ability to decode and manipulate genetic information and proteins structures have given us powerful new ways of investigating the mechanisms governing agents or processes that cause disease. At the same time, new robotic screening tools have given us the ability to assay thousands of chemicals simultaneously while MEMS and nanotechnology such as biofunctionalized cantilevers are beginning to allow us to peer into the complex chemistry at work inside cells.
However, up to now, these new experimental methods have not produced significant gains in the output of pharmaceuticals because we are still not able to efficiently process the tremendous amount of information necessary to design new drugs. For example, while automated compound screening systems could screen thousands of chemicals in a short period, the search for a chemical that binds specifically to a drug target will typically involve millions of compounds. In other words, though our experimental methods are impressive int their speed, power, and efficiency, they still fall far short of our requirements. What we need are ways to filter through tremendously large amounts of information to arrive at the few pertinent that we can uses to conduct experiments.
What is exciting is that these methods are coming online as a result of the increase in computational power and the development of sophisticated bioinformatics and computational chemistry software. Over the next five to ten years, we will begin to truly reap the rewards of rational drug design as a new generation of software tools that search and organize genetic information, predict protein structures and functions, and automatically screen for ligand specific binding agents begin cranking out thousands of good experimental candidates to be used as input by our improved experimental methods. Only then, when we have relieved the problem of information glut, will we see the true power of rational drug design.
If you're really serious about doing any type of biology or chemistry, a PhD is a requirement. Physics people have more in the way of engineering jobs at the MS level, but also need PhD to do serious research.
More to the point, designing and engineering a bridge is the art of integrating and applying commodity technologies to an unique set of requirements. The value offered by people doing the architecture lies in their ability to offer a custom tailored and extremely reliable product along with extensive support services throughout the lifetime of the product. IN other words, an irreplaceable part of the value lies with the reputation, reliability, and expertise of the product designers, so they need not worry about others stealing their designs.
With many software packages, almost all of the value lies in the unique algorithms and other ip contained within the source code. This is why they need to protect that information.
For "things that will never ever happen in reality" type articles.
Nanotech and biotech are merging fields. Nature has spent 2 billion years building efficient self-assembling machines and information processing systems. It would be insane for us nanotech people to ignore that.
We need to modify the systems we find in nature to optimize for rational design, operation under different chemical environments, and heirarchical assembly, but we will at least take inspiration, if not entire processes, from biological machinery.
I remember though that this is the typical speed in Si
Electrical signals travel at around 1/10 the speed of light.
Even though I write software for *nix environment, I use Windows XP on my workstation.
1. Hardware installation is a breeze.
2. Software installation is also a breeze.
3. Multimedia files play flawlessly on WinAmp and Windows Media Player (don't use the new one, go into the media player directory and make a shortcut to mplayer2, which is Media Player 6.4.
4. Free site licenses on Office and Visual Studios.
5. Easy file sharing with the other Windows workstations on the network.
6. Games
7. I'm used to the WinXP interface.
8. Very VERY seldomly has my WinXP machine crashed on me. In fact, it's more stable than my Linux install. The trick seems to be diligence in keeping only essential background services and putting together a computer with hardware that has been tested for stability and compatibility. I did this by buying a Dell...
I must admit that *nix is essential if you want a development platform for open source software. I'm currently considering a iBook or G4 Book for my next computer purchase.
Yeah, no kidding, WinXP is fine for work. Even if you work in a Linux/Unix environment, which I do, you can do fine with ssh and xwin32 (starting to sound like a Microsoft employee aren't I =) ).
Linux works fine too... until you try to install some new program or new hardware.
IMHO Linux - Servers. Unix - proprietary servers. Windows - desktop.
Works out great.
Sure you can use them to see stealth aircraft coming, but, due to the long wavelength nature of the radar, you can nail down the aircraft's location to about a 50 mile radius sphere.
Good luck trying to shoot it down.
Low observable planes, the Air Force's code name for stealth, also receive visual and infra red treatment to make them harder to detect that way.
All stealth missions are backed up by massive jamming from EA-6Bs and other aircraft.
With the F22, if an enemy aircraft does 1. Avoids getting shot down. 2. Detects it. 3. Catch up to it. It will still be almost impossible for the enemy plane to lock on. The F22's radar scans other radars and jams them at the precise moment when they try to lock on.
Bistatic and multisource radars are a threat, but again, the question is whether they get good enough signal to shoot. That answer's probably no. Furthermore, now a days JDAMs cost $25,000 a pop, which is pretty cheap compared to any type of radar emitter.
The cutting edge in LO, from the available literature, seems to be lowering maintanence costs and all-aspect stealth, which just means that infra red and visual stealth are becoming more and more important. Supposedly, with some clever arrangement of lights, one can make aircraft almost invisible to the eye as close as 1 mile out. With a plane flying at 500 mph, that's practically invisible.
So is stealth beatable? Sure, despite everything mentioned above, you can shoot down a stealth aircraft. The question is, how much is it gonna cost you to prepare the defenses? How much of your own equipment and people do you loose in the process? The answer, short of new breakthroughs in stealth detection, is enormous.
Does the US really need stealth in the modern environment? Not likely. The sales pitch is that taking on stealth is so daunting that it deters anyone from even trying. That's a statement that has some merit.
Seriously, this would be awesome for FPS if they reprogram it to be more compatible with those games (ie ability to use the key pad and type at the same time). The biggest thing going against accuracy when people are playing a game like Quake, other than eye strain, is that the mouse has mass and friction, which your arm muscles are constantly fighting against. Consequently, it's difficult to make large movements and small corrections with the same sensitivity set up. However, that's exactly what you need to do in a lot of situations you encounter in Quake/Counter Strike/UT. It would be great if they can rewrite the software to track your finger movements at high sampling rates and accuracies.
Yeah, but I don't think the key board knows which finger is which, unless you start wearing a corresponding electronic tag on each finger or something.
G77 works great, but what about ifc (Intel Fortran Compiler)? Anybody tried using it? I tried using ifc (free Linux version) to compile some of my Fortran 77 code, but the program crashes on writing to and from internal files. Is ifc only compatible with Fortran 95? Is G77 compatible with Fortran 95? Anybody know other good free compilers?